I Was Impersonated On Facebook

For months somebody (I don't know who) has been running a Facebook profile that bears my name, my personal information and several photos of me.

An old high school friend had connected with the faker, instead of me. Several of the people with whom fake Matt is friends also appeared to be fakes, including a copycat of
Vertex Pharmaceuticals
founder and chief executive Joshua Boger. (Boger has a real Facebook profile but isn't friends with me. He declined to comment on the fakesters.) I couldn't see this Fake Matt's profile myself, even by searching for my name.

This pretender was one of 100 impersonators of scientists, journalists and science policy wonks uncovered by Lucas Laursen, a reporter at Nature, the scientific journal. Most of the people who were copied are somehow linked to the biotech industry, and many are linked to the especially controversial field of embryonic stem cell research. Ruth McKernan, chief scientific officer of Pfizer's
regenerative medicine unit is on the list; so was University of Wisconsin bioethicist Alta Charo, whose thinking about stem cells has been hugely influential. (See the Nature article.)

My trip from Facebook to fakebook began in February when I got a friend request from Rick Weiss, the former Washington Post science writer. I'd admired Weiss' work for years and was thrilled to speak on a panel with him in Madison, Wis.; I accepted the request immediately.

Except, of course, this wasn't the real Rick Weiss. Someone had copied Weiss' profile, including his phone number, e-mail and family photos, and had friended more than 100 people. The impostor was broadcasting the real Rick Weiss' status updates via the fake account, probably because he had friended Weiss with another fake profile. I even had an on-Facebook exchange with Fake Rick on his wall at some point, about a YouTube video that featured lambs and LED lights.

When Laursen, the Nature reporter, told me I'd been had, I was sure he was wrong and that I was friends with the real Rick Weiss. I called Weiss on the phone number listed on his profile, and e-mailed him too. Both the phone number and the e-mail address were legit. But though Weiss remembered me, he said he had never sent me a friend request on Facebook. Fake Rick and I had several mutual friends, including a Wall Street Journal reporter, a savvy lawyer and a public relations executive.

Whoever the impostor was, he took my profile information, including my photo, and started a new profile page that looked exactly like mine. The impostor wasn't part of the networks for Forbes or MIT, where I went to college. But the only tip-off that he wasn't the real me was the lack of those networks and the fact that there was another Matthew Herper on Facebook who had more friends.

After I called Facebook to get a comment for this story, the company immediately deleted my fake profile; the fake Rick Weiss and Josh Boger profiles are still up.

Facebook regularly torpedoes fake profiles but doesn't disclose how many have been taken down. The company doesn't know how many impostors are on its Web site, says spokesman Barry Schnitt. It doesn't allow people to use prominent celebrity names (like Barack Obama) but often relies on users to report copycats. The company and law enforcement agencies have been far more concerned with tools that allow people to hide from each other in order to prevent harassment. That's why I couldn't see my impersonator.

"The whole benefit and the point of Facebook, for most people, is to reflect their real-world connections," says Schnitt. "There isn't really much point of being someone else on Facebook."

Which is true, to a point. Why would somebody want to pretend to be me? My high school buddy says my doppelganger wasn't sending out status updates. Maybe this was an attempt to find out what science-types say on Facebook. I can't imagine anybody said anything interesting.

My first reaction to finding out I had an online imitator was to laugh. But then I realized that I'd already kept my page scrubbed clean of family photos or pictures of my kids. Reporters get hate mail (it's a fact of life), so I was already feeling guarded about my online existence.

But now I'm wondering if I should start to treat Facebook as a completely public space, where I assume people actually are eavesdropping. A bit of an odd analogy: In my nine years covering the biotech industry, I've heard a lot of hand-wringing about keeping genetic information private. That's the reason that recent thoughts about doing away with some of that privacy by Harvard Researcher George Church, partly because guarantees of privacy are illusory anyway, have interested me. (For more on Church's work, see "Going To Church.")

I've reconnected with that high school buddy who was friends with my doppelganger. But I think we'll avoid any deep online discussions. Sometime soon, I hope, we can get together in a crowded bar for a nice drink and some private conversation.

I believe this is biology's century. I've covered science and medicine for Forbes from the Human Genome Project through Vioxx to the blossoming DNA technology changing the world today. Email me, follow me on